Here the old man caught at her unfinished words. “Thy uncle Everard, wench!—Well, get on.—What of thy precious and loving uncle Everard?”
“Nothing, sir,” she said, “if the subject displeases you.”
“Displeases me?” he replied, “why should it displease me? or if it did, why shouldst thou, or any one, affect to care about it? What is it that hath happened of late years—what is it can be thought to happen that astrologer can guess at, which can give pleasure to us?”
“Fate,” she replied, “may have in store the joyful restoration of our banished Prince.”
“Too late for my time, Alice,” said the knight; “if there be such a white page in the heavenly book, it will not be turned until long after my day.—But I see thou wouldst escape me.—In a word, what of thy uncle Everard?”
“Nay, sir,” said Alice, “God knows I would rather be silent for ever, than speak what might, as you would take it, add to your present distemperature.”
“Distemperature!” said her father; “Oh, thou art a sweet lipped physician, and wouldst, I warrant me, drop nought but sweet balm, and honey, and oil, on my distemperature—if that is the phrase for an old man’s ailment, when he is wellnigh heart-broken.—Once more, what of thy uncle Everard?”
His last words were uttered in a high and peevish tone of voice; and Alice Lee answered her father in a trembling and submissive tone.
“I only meant to say, sir, that I am well assured that my uncle Everard, when we quit this place”—
“That is to say, when we are kicked out of it by crop-eared canting villains like himself.—But on with thy bountiful uncle—what will he do?—will he give us the remains of his worshipful and economical housekeeping, the fragments of a thrice-sacked capon twice a-week, and a plentiful fast on the other five days?—Will he give us beds beside his half-starved nags, and put them under a short allowance of straw, that his sister’s husband—that I should have called my deceased angel by such a name!—and his sister’s daughter, may not sleep on the stones? Or will he send us a noble each, with a warning to make it last, for he had never known the ready-penny so hard to come by? Or what else will your uncle Everard do for us? Get us a furlough to beg? Why, I can do that without him.”